‘Rinse them!’
Two grinning urchins appeared, extravagantly warpainted, who were revealed on closer inspection to be Musters and Hellyer. Gleefully, they emptied buckets of cold salt water over FitzRoy’s and Darwin’s heads.
‘You see?’ said Musters to Hellyer. ‘I told you they would let us do it. What larks!’
‘I assure you, Darwin, it would be a deal worse were you not my travelling companion,’ insisted FitzRoy, in his most placatory tone.
‘I do believe, FitzRoy, that this “ceremony” is in some way parodic of the sacrament of baptism. I am not sure that I entirely approve.’
‘The effects of these mummeries are entirely positive on those who prepare them. They speak of them for a long time afterwards.’
Any further conversation was rendered out of the question as the two planks were dipped forward, and FitzRoy and Darwin tumbled head over heels, still tied to their chairs, into cold salty water.
‘What fools these sailors make of themselves,’ grumbled Darwin, as they towelled themselves off in FitzRoy’s cabin shortly afterwards.
‘It is an absurd piece of folly,’ said FitzRoy.
‘Most disagreeable,’ said Darwin.
The rituals of the equator aside, it had been a largely uneventful crossing, punctuated only by the disappointment of not being allowed to put in at Tenerife, where news of London’s cholera outbreak had preceded them. They had picked up the north-east trades at the Cape Verde Islands and had made rapid passage thereafter. Darwin had filled his time trawling for jellyfish and microscopic sea-creatures, using a home-made net constructed from bunting and an iron hoop. Lieutenant Wickham had cursed the ‘Flycatcher Philosopher’ for the specimens that oozed and glistened across his pristine deck, but always with his tongue in his cheek.
‘If I were skipper, all your damned mess would be chucked overboard, and you after it!’ he had bellowed.
FitzRoy’s day was always the same: breakfast at eight, a morning inspection of the ship, a midday check on the chronometers, a one o’clock dinner of rice, peas and bread with Darwin, then the afternoon spent with Hellyer seeing to the ship’s logbook and papers. He still found time, however, to teach Darwin how to dry, preserve and log his sea creatures; how to make drawings, notes and measurements; how to attach matching labels to the specimens and their containers, and how to catalogue when and where they had been caught. Darwin, for his part, was mildly surprised that FitzRoy did not spend his days striding about the deck in full dress uniform, like Nelson in the heat of battle.
When the day was over, after their antiscorbutic supper of meat, pickles, dried apple and lemon juice, Darwin would join Wickham or Sulivan for a little conversation at the wheel; unless it was a Sunday, of course, when Sulivan would be excused duty on religious grounds. On windless evenings in the tropics, Darwin sat out on a boom with Midshipman King, watching the waves furl past the prow. These were the evenings he liked best: when the air was still and deliciously warm, the heavens shone clear and high, and the white sails filled with soft air and flapped gently against the masts.
When the wind got up, however, and the Beagle bowled along, the old seasickness returned, and he took to his cabin at the ‘lively’ end of the ship. If Stokes was working at the chart table, he could not put up his hammock, so the assistant surveyor would allow him to lie curled on the tabletop instead, and would work around the philosopher’s recumbent body. ‘Old fellow, I must take the horizontal for it,’ Darwin would gasp, before prostrating himself across unrolled charts of the Brazilian coast.
Jemmy Button would come by to sympathize. ‘Poor, poor fellow,’ he would exclaim, but then he would turn away, trying not to smile, for he could not understand how the mere motion of the sea could make anybody ill.
Sometimes, when FitzRoy was immersed in his paperwork, and Usborne or Sulivan was officer of the watch, they would discreetly reduce sail to lessen the philosopher’s woes. There never was such a fine body of men, thought Darwin through his queasiness. He even forgave Sulivan for rousing him from sleep one morning, with the excited shout that a grampus bear had been seen swimming off the port bow. Haring up to the maindeck in his nightshirt, he had been greeted by the massed laughter of the morning watch. It was, of course, the first of April.
Two days later they had made Rio harbour, entering proudly under full sail, scattering flocks of yellow-billed boobies left and right. There they had careened to an extravagant stop alongside the Ganges, and FitzRoy had ordered every inch of canvas taken in and immediately reset. Every ship in harbour was watching, he knew, but he asked God to forgive him such little acts of vanity. The display was immaculate: no man-of-war of any nation would dare to take on this little sounding ship in a sail-setting competition again. Every skipper in Rio knew of the Samarang’s humiliation. Even Darwin volunteered to help with the sail display, so Wickham gave him a main royal sheet to hold in each hand and a topmast studding sail tack to bite between his teeth, and told him to let go the instant he heard the order to ‘shorten sail’. Standing there in his top-coat and tails, his double-breasted waistcoat, his stock and his cravat, a rope in each hand and one clamped in his mouth, he made a remarkable sight. It was perhaps a little mischievous of Wickham to have positioned him like that some five minutes earlier than was necessary, but the philosopher was too excited to be part of South America’s number one crew to notice his shipmates’ amusement.
At midday FitzRoy and Stebbing rated the chronometers, double-checking the position of Rio de Janeiro on the charts, and were able to confirm what they had begun to suspect during the Beagle’s approach to the city: something was seriously wrong with the existing map.
‘It is unmistakable.’ FitzRoy outlined the problem to Darwin over dinner. ‘There is a four-mile discrepancy between the positions of Rio and Bahia. Which means that one of them has always been located in quite the wrong place.’
‘Who made the charts?’
‘They are French, drawn up by Baron Roussin. The Admiralty has never seen the necessity of duplicating his work.’
‘McCormick will be pleased.’
‘The inconvenience is terrible.’
‘Why? How long will it take Stokes to draw a new chart?’
‘As long as it takes us to sail back to Bahia.’
‘Back to Bahia? But that is eight hundred miles up the coast! Can you spare the time?’
‘No. But I have no choice. I cannot complete a chain of meridian distances around the world if there is a flaw at the very commencement of the calculation.’
‘How long will it set us back?’
‘Two months. But I suggest that you would be best served by passing the time on shore, my dear fellow. You might profitably explore the tropical forest and collect specimens. I shall give Earle shore leave also, to make drawings, and Mr King.’
‘Mr King?’
‘To be quite frank with you, Mr Stokes will need the chart cabin all to himself. I do not wish the Admiralty’s new map of the Brazils to have to incorporate our ship’s philosopher’s left knee.’
‘Just think yourself lucky, my dear FitzRoy, that you do not have to journey back over the equator twice more.’
‘Here’s to that.’
They clinked their water-glasses.
Darwin removed his Panama hat - he had exchanged his top hat for a Panama as his one concession to informality - and mopped his brow. The thermometer read ninety-six degrees. He looked enviously across at Patrick Lennon, who appeared altogether cooler in an unbuttoned shirt and cotton breeches; but as the natural philosopher of the Beagle, Darwin did have certain standards to uphold. Lennon was a young, charming and energetic Irish coffee planter whom he had encountered at a formal dinner aboard HMS Warspite, who had offered to escort Darwin upcountry to see his fazenda. Their party was seven-strong in all: four Portuguese and a thirteen-year-old mulatto guide made up the numbers. They had started early, mounted on glossy black horses, and had ridden into the hills behind Praia Grande, th
rough rounded plantations of coffee-bushes and rustling sugar cane. As the sun rose, the blue dawn light had faded away to be replaced by all the intense colours of the forest: slender green palms swaying like ship’s masts, brilliant turquoise butterflies making random sallies, immense copper-coloured anthills inching methodically skyward, and all of it bedded in a warm, rich, red earth that accumulated stickily upon the fetlocks of the horses. Darwin was enraptured: no engraving, he thought, could ever capture the ruddy glow of this scene. The forest was at its most beautiful at midday, he felt, when the upper branches shone bright emerald, and shafts of sunlight filtered down as if through a transept window. Writhing beneath was a wild, untidy, luxuriant hothouse, criss-crossed by a hundred shady pathways.
They breakfasted on black feijão beans and farinha flour at Ithacaia, a poor African village twelve miles north of Rio. It was the Brazilian custom to breakfast many hours into a journey, and to rely on thick black coffee to wake the sleeper. Thereafter they pushed on, through veils of mimosa and mazy skeins of hanging tendrils, in the direction of Ingetado. The silence of the forest was astonishing: while the Beagle’s passage along the Brazilian coast had been greeted by a shore battery of insect-calls audible a hundred yards out above the surf, here in the vaulted forest no sound could be heard. The only exception was the determined chatter of an ebony battalion of shiny-headed leaf-cutter ants, which stretched as far as the eye could see in either direction. Darwin stopped to place a rock in their path. The ants would not head round it, but instead launched sally after furious sally against their immutable attacker. Was this the species discovered by Linnaeus in 1758? he wondered. Lennon and his companions could provide no help. Every time Darwin asked the given name of a flower, the same answer invariably came back: ‘F/ores.’ Whenever he enquired the identity of an animal, he was told: ‘Bixos.’ Taxonomy, it appeared, was not a local speciality.
They slept in a thicket under the dim moonlight, and beneath the stars the forest came alive. A concert of rhythmic frogs began, lit by winking fireflies, the plaintive cries of snipes providing a contralto melody. Breakfast of feijão beans and farinha flour was taken at Madre de Dios village amid sheets of rain, birds fluttering madly between the passion flowers. After the deluge had abated, steaming columns of dense white vapour poured upwards from the surrounding woods as the moisture returned to the sky.
At the Rio Macaé, where they had to swim alongside the horses to ford the torrent, they came across a gigantic rock rising from a plain of rhododendrons.
‘That is where a gang of runaway slaves hid out, not a year or two back,’ related Lennon. ‘They were all recaptured, except one old woman, who, sooner than be taken again, dashed herself to pieces from the summit.’
Darwin shuddered. The forest was a cruel environment, there was no doubt of that. Everywhere one looked, strangulating creepers twisted about each other like tresses of braided hair, each fighting to squeeze the breath from its adversary. Luxuriant parasitical orchids drank the fluid of their victims with dainty care. Lianas crawled over the rotting corpses of fallen trees, the trunks split and gaping open in the fixed attitudes of death. He felt torn between a sublime devotion to the God who could create such marvellous beauty, and awe at the cruelty of Him who would devise such a world, founded as it was upon a pitiless struggle for survival.
They slept the second night at Ingetado, following a hearty meal of feijão beans and farinha flour. In the morning they rode past a lagoon, many miles from the sea, its shores a mass of broken shells. Was this the proof of the Biblical flood that FitzRoy was so keen to establish? Darwin collected specimens, delving under logs and stones, chasing pale fat worms through clammy leaf litter, and peering into the rainwater traps of bromeliads in search of gaudy spiders. In a pile of decaying wood he found a wriggling heap of gorgeous orange-and-black flatworms, like striped and dandified slugs. But these were sea creatures! What were aquatic planariae doing here, so far from the sea? He had discovered a species new to science, he realized, but what was the connection between these land flatworms, their marine cousins and the flood? His brain whirled with possibilities.
They spent the third night in the venda at Campos Novos, where the innkeeper had learned a smattering of English and was keen to practise his skills.
‘What have you for supper?’ Darwin enquired hungrily.
‘Anything you choose, sir,’ the man replied grandly, his fingers spread upon his belly.
‘Thank goodness for that! So, is there any fish you can do us the favour of giving?’
‘Oh! No, sir.’
‘Any soup?’
‘Oh! No, sir.’
‘Any bread?’
‘Oh! No, sir.’
‘Any dried meat? Carne secca?’
‘Oh! No, sir.’
Lennon laughed like a drain. ‘Welcome to the Brazils, Mr Darwin.’
After an interval, it was established by one of the Portuguese members of the party that the innkeeper could offer either feijão beans or farinha flour, or both.
On the fourth day the forest thickened and the showers closed in, and the little mulatto guide had to hack at the fronds with a sword to clear the path up into the high hills. Finally, towards the end of the morning, they reached Lennon’s fazenda. A large bell clanged out and a cannon was fired to announce the arrival of the senhor, and a crowd of black slaves rushed forth to be blessed by the white men. A neat slave-line formed up in starched white smocks, to sing a Catholic morning hymn of the most sublime harmonic sweetness. Lennon lived like a little god here, Darwin realized, his wealth untold, his power absolute. The Irishman smiled and invited him on up to the house.
The fazenda proved to be a white-painted two-storey mansion with rustic blue shutters, a thick reed roof and a wrought-iron balcony, which sat on a gentle rise under a permanent blanket of low, sticky clouds. Even here, nature’s myrmidons kept up their ceaseless assault: tree roots slithered across the courtyard, blotchy green mould insinuated itself beneath mirror-glass, while the opposing forces of mildew and whitewash grappled for possession of the walls. Dogs, baby chickens and little black children ran left and right through the ground floor of the house. Piles of banknotes lay aimlessly about the heavy gilded furniture, comprehensively chewed through by grubs.
‘Nothing I can do with it,’ remarked Lennon, indicating the money. ‘Nothing I can do to stop it,’ he added, with reference to its gradual consumption. ‘I have everything I want here, without recourse to money. Take some, if you like.’ Darwin declined as politely as he could.
A servant showed him to his room on the first floor. There were rifles mounted on the walls, a cast-iron cot in the corner, and no glass in the windows. In the dark, gloomy wardrobe were two jars of yellow fluid, the pickled grey snakes inside coiled lifelessly against the glass. He changed, laid out his sweat-stained clothes to be washed, and descended the stairs once more. Lennon had been joined by a short, spherical, olive-skinned Portuguese, and his younger, heavily made-up female equivalent, who had squeezed herself into a liberally frilled dress.
‘Mr Darwin, I have the honour to present Dom Manuel Joaquem da Figuireda, my partner in business, and his daughter Donna Maria. Donna Maria is married to Mr Lumb, a Scotchman.’
Lumb, who had the lugubrious air of a half-asleep walrus, moved from the shadows to shake Darwin’s fingers, but said nothing. Darwin sensed that Lumb had seen in Donna Maria a match to improve his financial situation.
‘Do you ride to hounds, Mr Darwin?’ asked Dom Manuel, unable to conceal a grin.
‘Of course, Senhor. What well-born Englishman does not?’
‘Excellent. Then tomorrow we shall have a hunt.’
‘You have hounds, here?’
‘We have five hounds,’ said Donna Maria, in the clipped accent of one who has carefully studied a foreign language. ‘Trumpeta, Mimosa, Clariena, Dorena and Champaigna.’
‘But what do you hunt? Surely there are no foxes!’
‘Monkeys, Mr Darwin. We hunt
bearded monkeys!’ Dom Manuel cackled and clapped Darwin on the back.
‘You see, Mr Darwin, even here in the Mata Atlantica there is no aspect of civilized society that we cannot replicate,’ smiled Lennon. ‘Would you care for coffee?’
Coffee was kept bubbling continuously in a big black skillet on the iron kitchen range. Presently, a small greasy-fingered black boy appeared with a full jug and several cups, and handed one to Darwin.
‘Pray excuse me,’ said Darwin, with a trace of embarrassment.
‘Would you mind if I exchanged my cup? There is a fingermark.’
Immediately, Lennon picked up a riding-crop and lashed it across the little boy’s head, not once but three times. The child screamed in pain and terror. A red rivulet streamed from his nose, and across his upper lip, before dividing into smaller streams between his teeth; he fled sobbing from the house, a further coffee-cup tumbling with a smash as he ran. Darwin sat frozen with horror. Dom Manuel and his daughter continued to smile as if nothing had happened. Lennon, as charming now as he had been before the attack, offered his apologies: ‘I’m sorry for the slave boy. Those people know no better. There are too many damned kids about the place. I think I shall sell some of them at the public auction in Rio.’
‘The children will be sent to market ... separately from their mothers and fathers?’ Darwin was still stunned, so his words came out slowly.
‘Oh, they are well used to it, Mr Darwin. Savages do not enjoy the same emotional closeness as we civilized people.’
They rode out the next morning, past the long, low sheds housing the hundreds of plantation slaves and the little stone chapel adjoining. Black huntsmen in maroon jackets rode ahead, to encircle the forest wildlife and drive it back towards the guns. Then an old Portuguese priest in a wide-brimmed hat blew upon a hunting-horn, and the main party moved forward. Before long they ran into the squawking, whooping mass of monkeys, parrots, toucans and other creatures that had been corralled towards them, all of which were unceremoniously blasted out of the sky. The monkey’s prehensile tails tightened as they died, so their corpses hung farcically from the branches while the huntsmen rode around in circles beneath, trying to bring them down. Darwin did not enjoy his sport. The episode with the slave boy had affected him badly, and he was keen to return to the coast.